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Southern Africa: a food crisis in the making - testimony to Committee on International Relations of US House of Representatives, Washington DC, USA

Executive Director

It was almost exactly a decade ago that the House Select Committee on Hunger held a hearing on impending famine in southern Africa. The memory of a million lives lost in Ethiopia in the mid 1980s was still fresh then.

In 1992, all the danger signs were there again in southern Africa -- food prices were spiking, livestock was being sold or dying, people were migrating out of the countryside. At least 20 million people were at risk. But in the end there was no famine.